Portrait | ‘Making America a conservative country again’

IF you only read the headlines, it's easy to get the impression that Project 2025 is something secretive cooked up in Republican back rooms that the American public will find out about only when it's already too late. But the opposite is true: it's an open project with a website where anyone can see exactly who financed and developed it, what they want to accomplish and how they will go about doing so.

What is also true is that even Donald Trump is hesitant to be associated with it. “I know nothing about Project 2025," he wrote on his Truth Social platform in July. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying, and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."

Only Trump would know how you could simultaneously know nothing about something and yet find parts of it “ridiculous and abysmal". That is, if you accept that he's not simply lying through his teeth to avoid an association with the project costing him votes in November's election. Because Project 2025 is impossible to miss, just as it's impossible to miss that it focuses on the president. On the website and everywhere else where you see the words “Project 2025", you will also see underneath it in capital letters:

PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION PROJECT.

The other possible explanation for “I know nothing" is that Trump struggles to accept that the Grand Old Party's vision for a conservative new America doesn't necessarily depend on him being president. There are many points of overlap between Project 2025 and Trump's own Agenda 47 election manifesto, but the former was born at a time when it was still uncertain whether Trump's ambitions would survive the aftermath of his election defeat in 2020. Agenda 47 is Trump's plan if he wins the election; Project 2025 is about a vision that is broader than the individual who will become the 47th president of the US.

Project 2025 was founded in 2022 by the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think-tank that has been helping to formulate Republican party policy since Ronald Reagan's time. Trump might get away with pretending he knows nothing about Project 2025, but doing so about the Heritage Foundation would be much harder. The foundation proclaims that Trump enthusiastically implemented nearly two-thirds of its policy proposals in his first year as president.

Moreover, Project 2025's three most senior executives are Trump loyalists who served in his administration: Paul Dans, Spencer Chretien and Troup Hemenway. They were apparently chosen for their firsthand knowledge of the inner workings of the federal executive branch – and thus also how to radically reshape it.

Project 2025 is much more than just a collection of policy proposals in case Trump gets another four years in the White House. It's a radical and highly detailed plan of action to dismantle the authority and powers of the federal government and to concentrate more power in the office of the president. It has a clear and openly declared overarching goal: to make America a conservative country again.

It's a blueprint that can be put into action on the first day the next Republican president sits at the desk in the Oval Office, whether it's Trump or someone else, and whether it happens in 2025 or later.

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections," Project 2025  declares on its website. “If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project."

To achieve this, Dans told Associated Press last year, “we need to flood the zone with conservatives. This is a clarion call to come to Washington. People need to lay down their tools and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve'.”

Kevin Roberts, president of Project 2025, says the focus is on four fronts “that will determine America's future". These are broadly:

• Restore the traditional family as the centre of American life “and protect our children".
• Take powers away from the federal administrative state and give them back to “the American people".
• Stand up for and protect the US's sovereignty, borders and bounty against external threats.
• “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely – what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty'."

The blueprint to achieve these ideals includes a remarkable amount of detail, such as specific plans for the economy and immigration, recommendations for key positions in the White House, and the types of people who should serve in the cabinet, Congress, federal agencies and commissions, and advisory boards. The plan goes as far as outlining a selection process for appointing and employing “the right people" at every level of government.

It contains details on how and by whom federal departments such as  health, education, labour and justice should be managed, how their budgets should be adjusted, how their powers should be changed, and which programmes should be scaled back or eliminated.

For example, it says on page 283 of Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise about the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS):

Medicare and Medicaid combined cost $17.8 trillion [over that period], while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.

And on the same page:

HHS is also home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the duo most responsible – along with President Joe Biden – for the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the Covid-19 pandemic.

While Project 2025 aims to devolve some powers to the states, it also follows the so-called “unitary executive” doctrine whereby power is concentrated in an executive authority that ultimately resides entirely with the president.

That is why Melissa Gira Grant wrote in The New Republic: “Project 2025’s 180-Day Playbook is a remarkably detailed guide to turning the United States into a fascist’s paradise."

Grant sees in Project 2025 “a Christian nationalist vision of the United States, one in which married heterosexuality is the only valid form of sexual expression and identity; all pregnancies would be carried to [full] term, even if that requires coercion or death; and transgender and gender-nonconforming people do not exist”.

This might be an extreme interpretation, but then again, several  organisations that helped draft Project 2025 are certainly on the far right of the spectrum when it comes to issues like religion in schools, the environment and fossil fuels, abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

Trump might have abortion in mind when he says parts of Project 2025 are “ridiculous and abysmal”, as he has clearly been alarmed by the public’s angry backlash against the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Consequently, he has ensured that a federal abortion ban is not officially part of the Republican Party’s platform for an election this year for the first time in more than four decades – Trump wants such powers to be fully delegated to the states.

In contrast, the Mandate for Leadership says on page 458 that the Federal Drug Administration “[should] reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicised approval process was illegal from the start".

On other matters, the gap between Project 2025 and Trump’s own ideas is less clear, and in any case, a serving president would be able to decide how much of it he wants to adopt as his own.

Yet, for someone like Trump, who has a reputation for not paying much attention to the finer points of policy differences, the temptation might be strong to occasionally rely on a detailed and well-thought-out plan created by people whose political instincts he shares and trusts.

And that is precisely what Project 2025 is.

♦ VWB ♦

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